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Trivial Secrets

September 9, 2011 3:34 amSeptember 9, 2011 3:34 am

At the airport lounge, finally — Moscow traffic lives up to its reputation. So a quick note.

I do very little “insider” stuff — not my thing. In the case of the new jobs proposal, however, the WH did make a point of giving me the plan in advance, under very strict embargo — which was necessary given the logistics of filing a column from someplace 8 hours ahead. And this led to a very strange sensation.

There were quite a few reporters, Western as well as Russian, at Yaroslavl — and all of them knew, or thought they knew, that we were talking about a $300 billion plan, with very little spending. And I was, unusually, in the position of knowing the insider stuff they didn’t, that it was going to be 50 percent bigger with a significant amount of spending.

And it felt as if I was really in the know — which, I suspect, is a big journalistic trap.

For the fact is that this kind of inside information — knowing the details of some proposal a few hours before everyone else — is deeply trivial. I mean, it was helpful to me given this week’s schedule; but all the really important questions involve things no amount of access can tell you. How will this play in the national debate? How will Republicans respond? How well will the plan work if by some miracle it really does get by the GOP blockade?

Yet the desire to be on the inside and have some kind of ultimately trivial scoop can, I realize, be a big motivator. Even I had to step back and say, hey, this doesn’t matter; what really matters is the kind of analysis that anyone with access to the web can do.